AT&T reports $17.5 billion in profits, close to a million new subscribers

A week after Verizon posted their impressive earnings results, AT&T has followed suit. The nation’s number two carrier sits firmly in second place, both in regard to subscribers and revenue. They’ve reported gains in just about every category, and are up year-over-year from 2012.

AT&T reports a $17.5 billion profit, and $15.5 billion in mobile revenue. A robust $5.5 billion comes from wireless data revenue, and 989,000 new subscribers (net) added in Q3 alone. Their churn -- how many customers left -- was nearly stagnant, with a mere 1.07% for postpaid customers, and 1.31% including prepaid.

With the addition of nearly a million new subscribers, and 1.21 million if you don’t appreciate for churn, AT&T now says they have a full 75% of their postpaid subscriber base on smartphones. That’s up from 66% this time last year. Nearly three-quarters -- 72% -- of those postpaid customers are on a shared or tiered data plan, signalling the death of unlimited mobile for AT&T subscribers.

A respectible chunk of the nearly one million new customers were prepaid, with AT&T saying they added 192,000 prepaid customers in the quarter. AT&T also noted they had 719,000 net device activations in the quarter, but resellers lost 285,000 subscribers. AT&T attributes that loss to “losses in low-revenue 2G subscriber accounts.”